As often happens ahead of major product unveilings, a poster on a Chinese-language forum has posted some pictures of a highly anticipated device. Today, that comes in the form of pics of Samsung's expected Galaxy S IV smartphone. It's always best to take such photos with several grains of salt, since there's essentially nothing that we can do to verify their authenticity. That said, the phone looks as we'd expect: a fairly conservative, slightly larger version of the Galaxy S III with new software and upgraded specifications.

The pictured phone's specifications line up with current rumors, best guesses, and even some of the items on our feature wish list: it uses Android 4.2.1 with Samsung's now-familiar TouchWiz UI overlaid, a 5-inch 1080p display, 2GB of RAM, and Samsung's eight-core Exynos 5 Octa 5410 system-on-a-chip (SoC) with an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544 GPU. That graphics processor is very similar in architecture and performance to the one used in Apple's A5 and A5X chips, though we won't know how it performs for sure until we know how many GPU cores it has or what its clock speed is. The phone also supports SELinux, a key ingredient needed to support Samsung's new Knox enterprise management software for its smartphones.

Enlarge/ The phone, which has a model number of GT-I9502, runs Android 4.2.1 with TouchWiz on top.

As much as pundits like to see big companies taking big chances with their new products, it doesn't look like the world's largest Android vendor is doing anything along those lines. A safe design that builds on what came before (while using the same general aesthetics as the rest of the phones in Samsung's lineup) makes sense, given that the S IV is the follow-up to a hugely successful product. Ars will be on the scene at Samsung's Unpacked event on March 14 to confirm whether these rumors are true or simply very convincing fakes.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites